Why are interest rates so low? The best answer is that the advanced countries are still in a “managed depression”. This malady is deep. It will not end soon.
One can identify three different respects in which interest rates on “safe” securities in the principal high-income monetary areas (the US, the eurozone, Japan and the UK) are exceptionally low. First, the short-term intervention rates of central banks are 0.5 per cent or lower. Second, yields on conventional long-term government bonds are extremely low: the German 30-year bond yields 0.7 per cent, the Japanese close to 1.5 per cent, the UK 2.4 per cent and the US 2.6 per cent. Finally, long-term real interest rates are minimal: UK index-linked 10-year gilts yield minus 0.7 per cent; US equivalents yield more, but still only plus 0.4 per cent.
If you had told people a decade ago that this would be today’s reality, most would have concluded that you were mad. The only way for you to be right would be if demand, output and inflation were to be deeply depressed — and expected to remain so. Indeed, the fact that vigorous programmes of monetary stimulus have produced such meagre increases in output and inflation indicates just how weak economies now are.